Politics, Policy, and Inequality in South Africa Under COVID-19

David Francis, Imraan Valodia and Edward Webster

Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, 2020, vol. 9, issue 3, 342-355

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted and exacerbated inequalities in South Africa. The question posed in this article is whether the pandemic and its associated responses offer the opportunity for a more egalitarian society in South Africa, or a more intensively unequal society. The future is contested. On the one hand, there is the consolidation of labor displacement, a growth in unemployment, and a deepening of inequality. On the other, there is the possibility of a turning point toward significant advances in the de-commodification of education, health, and transport. But as with much of the Global South, South Africa has relatively high levels of informality compared to the Global North, which has implications for the impact of the pandemic and the structure of the responses.

Keywords: Inequality; social dialogue; compact; COVID-19; development (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2277976020970036 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:agspub:v:9:y:2020:i:3:p:342-355

DOI: 10.1177/2277976020970036

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy from Centre for Agrarian Research and Education for South
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().